For now, Forged Alliance Account were tied to computers. It was not possible to create or log in a second account on a single computer.

This protection is there to reduce the amount of smurfs.

Smurfing is utilizing an account with a lower ranking than usual to beat up on lesser players.

It is now possible to use an additional method to ‘validate’ your account, using your Steam Id.

It will tie your FAF account to your steam Id, using steam openid authentication (http://openid.net/). Using that, your Steam login and password will be never asked and/or linked to the database.

Only your steam Id will be used (http://steamidfinder.com/). It only allow the access to your Steam public profile, as well as your list of owned game.
FAF only check the presence of Forged Alliance in that list once, and doesn’t save any game or public profile information in the database.

Doing this allow:

Playing on a Virtual Machine.

Logging several accounts on the same computer.

Go freely on any other computer.

Restrictions:

When a FAF account linked to Steam is used on a computer, all the accounts used on that computer must use a linked profile too. Ask the owner of the computer before logging in with your linked account!

You can only tie one FAF account to a single Steam account.

There is no coming back. Once your account is linked, it’s not possible to un-link it. (that option may or may not be possible in the future).

The new updater.

We are currently changing the way FAFInstaller (and the update system) works.

Here is how it will work :

Until now, the updater was downloading the whole files. Now it will download a real patch. Meaning that instead of downloading 5-6 mb each time, you will have to download only a few kb (500 kb in the worst update case).

For using this, we have added a new server only for updating.

The steps done by the update server and clients :

The client check the current version of a bunch of files, and send these versions to the server.

The server will check in the DB the current version of the user (A) and the latest version available (B).

If the user doesn’t have the latest version, the server will look for a patch from A to B.

If the patch doesn’t exist yet, it will create it on the fly.

The server sends the patch to the client, and the client apply it.

That way, you will be able to upgrade from any version to the latest, if the original files are known by the server.

That also means that you can downgrade your version in order to play an old replay (in that case, it will create a folder with these old binaries and game datas).

Featured Mods will use that function too, so Featured Mod authors will be able to make frequent changes at ease.

What about Steam version ?

The next patch (3609) will be compatible with 3603, and so with steam version of the game.BUT
The exe and dll files from the steam version are totally differents from the retail version, in two major points :

It uses the Steam DRM.

It uses steamwork instead of GPGNet protocol.

As we are using GPGNet protocol for FAF, that version is incompatible. The solution would be to update the Steam version to the Retail version.

But because of point 1, that operation will be illegal : I can’t distribute a patch removing a DRM protection !

It’s still possible to mix a (legally owned) retail version with the Steam version by yourself. But FAF team can’t be held responsible for any damage caused by such manipulation (non-working copy or an possible steam ban – Unlikely but possible).